April 4, 2016 - A Giant Galaxy-eating Spiral in Space

A Giant Galaxy-eating Spiral in Space The enormous grand spiral galaxy NGC 1232 looks toward us face-on in this image, acquired in 1998 with the first FORS (FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph) instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal, Chile. The exposures were made in blue and red optical wavelengths as well as ultraviolet light. Located 60 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus, NGC 1232 is twice as wide as our Milky Way galaxy and, based on observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2013, is wrapped in a cloud of six-million-degree gas that may be the remnants of an ancient collision with a smaller dwarf galaxy. Such collisions could be the key method by which galaxies like NGC 1232 grow to such immense proportions.